Principal Payments Engineer
Founding senior engineer responsible for creating and operating Payabli’s Payments Core infrastructure, including ledgers, exactly-once money movement, multi-rail orchestration, settlement, and reconciliation. Requires 12+ years of production payments or financial-systems experience at major scale.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Establish correctness guarantees for payment execution, including exactly-once behavior under partial failures, retries, and cross-service races.
- Design internal and external APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, and webhook delivery guarantees.
- Direct multi-rail money-movement architecture across ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, and card networks, including sponsor-bank and Visa Direct integrations.
- Own batching, funding, settlement matching, reconciliation, and exception handling.
- Establish reliability, monitoring, alerting, architecture-review, and RFC standards for live payment processing.
- Set engineering practices, code-review standards, and technical hiring criteria for the Payments Core team.
Requirements
- 12+ years building production payments or financial systems.
- Experience operating at tens to hundreds of billions in GMV and owning architecture through production.
- Production experience designing or operating double-entry ledgers, including derived balances, hot-account partitioning, and schema evolution under load.
- Experience building idempotent, exactly-once payment flows in real-time, high-throughput systems.
- Distributed data architecture and petabyte-scale storage experience.
- Experience building high-throughput services with sub-50ms latency under production load.
- Deep experience with settlement and reconciliation using bank files, card-network settlement data, and ACH returns.
- Experience with multi-rail money movement and multi-financial-institution orchestration, including direct sponsor-bank and network integrations.
- Strong technical leadership through influence and example, with hands-on coding and design-review experience.
Nice to Have
- Experience at a payments platform of comparable scale, such as Stripe, Block/Square, Modern Treasury, Marqeta, or Adyen.
- Experience modernizing or hardening load-bearing payments platforms without interrupting money movement.
- Familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 20022, and scheme-level settlement file formats.
Compensation and Benefits
- Opportunity to help build a high-growth, venture-backed fintech company and establish its Payments Core organization.
- Values-driven team focused on customers, ownership, operational excellence, direct feedback, and continuous learning.
Skills
Payment Processing, Double-Entry Ledger, Distributed Systems, Idempotency, API Design, Webhook Delivery, Ach, Rtp, Fednow, Visa Direct, Reconciliation, Pci Dss, Iso 20022, Petabyte-Scale Storage, Observability
Similar jobs
Backend Engineering jobs
Okta
Bengaluru, India
Principal Software Engineer leading the modernization of an identity imports platform from a monolith to scalable distributed microservices. The role requires 12+ years of experience, deep Java and distributed-systems expertise, and cross-team technical leadership.
Vanta
Canada
Leads the architecture and phased delivery of Vanta’s enterprise organizational model, including multi-tenant structures, data isolation, permissions, and complex audit workflows. Requires 15+ years of backend engineering experience and a record of driving multi-quarter initiatives across teams.
Vanta
United States
Leads the architecture and phased delivery of an enterprise organizational model spanning tenancy, data isolation, permissions, audits, and residency requirements. Requires 15+ years of backend engineering experience and a record of driving complex initiatives across teams.
Redis
United States
Leads technical vision, architecture, and V2 development of Redis Feature Store for large-scale ML infrastructure. Requires 8+ years backend experience, expertise in Python/Go/Rust, cloud platforms, and data tools; mentors team and engages enterprise customers.
Fetch
United States
Principal engineer responsible for the architecture, scalability, reliability, and long-term technical strategy of Fetch’s advertising platform. The role requires deep distributed-systems expertise, production experience with high-volume backend systems, and hands-on technical leadership across organizations.